“NTT will release its Space Browser in October. This is a 3D browser in which the pages of the websites will be in 3D, so that the surfing experience is as “natural” as possible and the navigation through the structure of the website is improved.”

When are product marketing folks and geewhiz engineers going to learn that people don’t think in 3D, and that it’s not a ‘natural’ paradigm? It reminds me of Sun’s Looking Glass demo from last year and Microsoft’s 3D ‘gallery’ from a few years back. Those both really took of didn’t they?

It’s cute and will get your attention, but the browsing experience is not one to conceptualise in 3-D like this, if at all. Web pages are 2-dimensional and the web works in a linear pattern. Why add this literal depth?

I agree. I worked on a little project which was trying to create a 3D browsing experience. I heard a lot of the same ‘proof’ arguments about following the ‘natural world’. Basically it is something sounding good to investors or execs but no one did any user research on.

FWIW, Sun’s Looking Glass thing at least wasn’t about turning the desktop into some sort of 3D virtual reality extravaganza– mostly it offers a neat way of arranging windows so they take up less space. (The project’s still zipping along quite happily, btw: https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/)

I thought Chrome had just been something meant to compete with Java 3D, if it ever became serious, or to offer a commercial alternative to VRML, if it ever grew up. At any rate they were all over the board 3D, all exceeding normal human capacities in their demos. Too bad, because human capacities are at least a bit above complete flatness, and that’s all we get (save dropped shadows in our 2.5 D interfaces) in our interfaces.

I pointed to Looking Glass in my first post, not only because it’s another 3D app, but it’s also a perfect example of a solution looking for a problem. Some engineer (in this case Hideya) wonders whether or not something can be done, so he builds a prototype. He gets pleased with his effort and shows it to an exec, who thinks he’s found the next cool thing to bring to market, and tries to figure out how to productize the prototype. But all of this happens apart from any discussion about usability or interaction design, and the next thing you know you’ve got a product that doesn’t solve a real-world problem. I haven’t worked for NTT, but I’d be willing to bet I’ve just described the development cycle of Space Browser.

The other one I mentioned was the Microsoft gallery demo, where moved forward and back through a long room, and applications were arranged like paintings on the walls on either side. Anyone remember what that was called?

FWIW, Sun’s Looking Glass thing at least wasn’t about turning the desktop into some sort of 3D virtual reality extravaganza– mostly it offers a neat way of arranging windows so they take up less space. (The project’s still zipping along quite happily, btw: https://lg3d-core.dev.java.net/)

if the Looking Glass software did not work right or was limited in it’s functionality, we can correctly assume that some jack(looking Gl)ass wrote the program to have ALOT of bugs in it. LOL!!!